"As a data journalist, let me state my bias: I do not like scorecards," writes veteran data journalist Ron Campbell. "I’m greedy. I want all the data, and I want to analyze it myself." Here's how you can start doing the same.

California's psychiatric hospitals can be highly dangerous places, both for patients and staff. Lost work days and overtime pay are huge. But reporters looking to track down reliable data on assaults face an uphill climb.

One reporter's intrepid data quest has given reporters nationwide a new look at how their local hospitals rank when it comes to charity care. Check out these datasets for story ideas in your neck of the woods.

What to do when you can't find the right research for your story? A Florida newspaper pursued a novel collaboration with researchers on a new study on how the state's Medicaid program impacts children.

Are California hospitals doing a better job of preventing serious mistakes in the wake of a state program that issues high-profile penalties for such errors? One reporter finds reasons for doubt in the data.

While nearly half of Florida's kids rely on Medicaid, the program has battled persistent problems that have often left children without proper care. Reporter Maggie Clark of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune shares five key lessons from her reporting deep-dive.

Before Jackie Valley tackled her series on the unmet mental health needs of Nevada's children, “community engagement” had not been something she regularly practiced. She shares how she took the plunge.

In reporting her series on mental illness in Shasta County, Alayna Shulman didn't find the data she was hoping for. Instead, she highlighted that lack of data in her story. It was one of several lessons she took away from working on the project.

A deep dive into the data on federal pay-for-performance programs for hospitals turned up a few key lessons along the way for Healthline's Jenna Flannigan, including the importance of understanding what health metrics are actually measuring.

African American men in North Carolina suffer from some of the world’s highest rates of prostate cancer, but it's not exactly clear why. That tip was enough to launch News & Observer reporter Jay Price on a long reporting journey that would take him to churches, barber shops and community... more »

Reporter Liza Gross was seeking a fresh way to convey the risky environmental conditions facing California farming communities. But after running into a series of data swamps, she turned to experts for help and unexpectedly found her story in the strawberry fields of Oxnard, Calif.

Reporter Tom Corwin of The Augusta Chronicle was shocked to learn of 82 unexpected deaths in 2013 among disabled patients receiving care in community placements in Georgia. The discovery launched him on an extended data-driven investigation. Here he shares lessons from the series.

Photojournalist David Gross hatched a plan to crowdfund a project in which he'd photograph and offer art therapy to Syrian refugee children. It did not go as planned. Here he shares some of the lessons he learned along the way, and the images he captured.

A big national health report or new story breaks, and you'd like to cover the news with a local or regional angle. What should you keep in mind? Veteran investigative reporter Jeff Kelly Lowenstein offers five suggestions to get your story started.

To really engage audiences and maximize the impact of a big reporting project, it's vital to plan ahead. Reporter Jeff Kelly Lowenstein shares the strategies he used to give legs to a recent three-part investigative series on nursing home care.

Last fall, we had no idea how the Obamacare rollout was going to go. So Politico's Jennifer Haberkorn hit the road, and found very different experiences between states. She shares some of the lessons learned along the way, and how she found enrollees willing to tell their stories.

Reporters covering stories of people in stressful situations can find themselves struggling with "vicarious stress" and "compassion fatigue." Taking time to practice self-care and mindfulness can help reporters process their own emotions, even as they bear witness to others' difficulties.

Creating custom hormone therapy is big business for compounding pharmacies. Regulated by state pharmacy boards and not the FDA, compounders have been known to get a pass in the face of substantial trespasses. So just how safe are these drugs?

It is difficult not to view poverty-stricken farmworkers as victims and pesticide manufacturers (and those of us who benefit from them) as perpetrators. Yet, my reporting demonstrated the complexity of the issues involved, leaving me with the uneasy sense that there was no clear-cut solution.

For the Dennis Hunt grant, Burt Hubbard and I-News produced a package of stories including video, photos and interactive graphics on Colorado’s new exercise requirements in elementary school. Incorporating student journalists in the project required a good, solid plan.

Shortly after two teens were shot in 2011 by another boy who mistakenly thought they were part of a rival gang, a group of editors at the Boston Globe met to brainstorm ways to better cover urban gang violence. It was a familiar and vexing issue.

Some years ago, I began hearing from my sources that I should investigate the generic drug industry. A generic drug boom was underway and it had led to a gold-rush mentality, they said. There seemed no good way into this nebulous topic, and no way to assess the actual quality of U.S. generic drugs.

When I think about lessons learned in the past six months, two phrases come to mind: time management and narrowing the scope of my projects. Finding sources, doing the research, these things can take a great deal of time.

To document Rubbertown, Ky., residents’ claims of unusually high rates of disease, I needed hard data. Originally, I had planned a health survey of the areas around the industrial plants. When that proved impractical, I enlisted a state health monitoring agency.

In 1973, nearly every Michigan resident was exposed to a toxic chemical. As I brought this story out of the shadows and examined the lasting health effects, I had an advantage: the story was heavily archived and documented.

At first, investigating what kind of discipline the Wisconsin Medical Examining Board was meting out to physicians in response to complaints seemed like a straightforward records search. But it ended up being a more complicated process.

How could legislation designed to protect people from suspected cancer-causing compounds in furniture foam fail to pass? Experts say lobbying money had a lot to do with it. Here's how I tracked the millions of dollars spent by the chemical industry to defeat the bill.

When it comes to health issues, the southeastern corner of Virginia usually is pretty average. That’s why I was surprised to discover a report that showed a city in my readership area has the highest cancer mortality rate in the state.

Former Bloomberg reporter Rob Waters describes his two-year-long quest to interview the “Berlin patient” – at the time, the only known individual to be “cured” of AIDS – and offers tips on how to find sources in the emerging field of AIDS cure research.

Pairing English-language and ethnic media to report stories can be rewarding and result in great journalism — but it poses its own challenges. Sharon Salyer and Alejandro Dominguez share what they learned from each other in reporting an award-winning series on Hispanic mental health.

There’s hardly a health story out there that cannot benefit from some good data – from estimates of the number of elderly Americans to hospital quality ratings for your community.This article will help you find useful databases and offer guidance on how to use them accurately. The first pa

The first step in asking a stranger to open up to you is to follow the golden rule: Treat others as you would like to be treated. Get more tips on interviewing patients from a veteran broadcast journalist.

Rural adults are older, sicker, less educated, less well paid and less likely to have health insurance than their city counterparts. Here are some great tips for covering rural health issues — and avoiding common misconceptions — from veteran health journalist and journalism professor Patricia